


Medical Academy Tales

by StarsAndUniverses



Category: Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers: Prime
Genre: Backstory, Canon is Fake Actually, M/M, bc he is the most impulsive glitch, everyone who knows ratch is constantly on edge
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-25
Updated: 2020-12-19
Packaged: 2021-01-02 19:13:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21166550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarsAndUniverses/pseuds/StarsAndUniverses
Summary: A backstory for TFP Ratchet because I love him and he’s great! I’m highkey retconning all the TFP lore, and I’ll build up the world through these chapters.





	1. Adoption

The little hatchling bumbled around, wobbling on unsteady legs. Its optics burned a proud gold, stronger than the more common yellow optics, and indeed glittering like their color would suggest. It glared murderously at a chair, its final destination, as it pushed itself back onto two tiny pedes and kept going on its perilous journey. 

All smooth curves, with no discernable kibble yet, it was clear that the sparkling had just come out of its egg mode for the very first time. The soft, malleable plating already had dents and scratches along all of its legs and gloves of an organic blue fabric of some kind covered its hands. 

“Perceptor, look! It was hatched with sensitive hands! That’s bound to be a good trait if we want to raise an engineer!” 

“It’s also very likely to be a great hurdle while it’s still young. We’re busy mechs, Brainstorm, do you really think we can raise a sparkling in the first place?” 

“Uhm, hello? Do you have any questions?” A mech with a soft white paint job walked up to the bickering pair, a big grin on his face, “Are you two looking to raise a sparkling?”

“Yes! Yes, we are!” Brainstorm didn’t give Perceptor a chance to object, “In fact, we think the one with the gloves is really cute!” 

“Oh, his name is Ratchet! He’s got medic hands already! He’s a bit fussy for now, but he’s got quite a spirit! He’s been trying to climb that chair all day.” 

“Really?” Brainstorm leaned over the baby fence to ogle as little baby Ratchet tried his hardest to pull himself onto the padded chair. His chevron was way too big for his tiny face, making his frown seem ten times more intense than a newspark should be able to be. 

Perceptor flinched away from the fence when the stern little face turned towards him. The baby beeped at him in binary, pointing at the chair angrily. The caretaker with them laughed, “You can go in and help him if you would like.” 

Brainstorm looked downright jealous as Perceptor carefully stepped over the fence and walked over to pick up the beeping hatchling. After a long moment of eye contact, Perceptor gently placed Ratchet onto the chair. Ratchet patted down the padding by crawling in a little circle, then plopped himself down on his baby butt. Not two seconds later, he made grabby hands up at the monocled engineer and yelled out more binary demandingly. 

The caretaker laughed jovially, a bright light in his eyes as he stopped checking his and Brainstorm’s adoption documentation. 

“Ratchet wants you to pick him up again! Feel free to spend some time with him!” 

Perceptor brought the little sparkling up to his face, eyes glowing with a deep love for Ratchet already. Ratchet’s gloves pet Perceptor’s cheek and looked deep into his optics, then nodded, satisfied with his analysis. He tapped Perceptor’s monocle, taking it off his face in one swipe and putting it up to his own eyes. 

Perceptor felt his spark melt as he whipped back around towards Brainstorm and declared “This will be our sparkling.” 

Brainstorm tackled him in a hug, “I knew you would come around, Percy! We’ll be great sires, I’m sure of it!” 

Perceptor cradled the small sparkling in his hands, unable to stop a big smile from plaguing his face as Ratchet yawned and transformed back into his egg mode to sleep. 

“Yes. We will, Brainstorm.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was watching TFP like "Wait a minute. I've seen this personality traits before..." and that's how this chapter was born! Also, the "egg" thing is basically that newsparks will find their way to nurseries and form their bodies into a spherical shape, an egg, which has a tough shell to protect the developing systems. Once most are complete, the sparkling will transform out of their egg mode into a bipedal one, and go through a time where they can go back and forth. Eventually, at about toddler age of development, they get their own alt mode and their plating is no longer circular and egg-like. All of this spawned from that one time High Tide from Rescue Bots was calling the Rescue Team young and referred to them as hatchlings.


	2. Fan

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Percy can literally never catch a break.

“Uh, Percy? A little help here?” 

“What is it, Brainstorm?”

“...come look for yourself.” 

Perceptor sighed as he put the cubes he’d been washing back into the sink and braced himself for whatever mess Brainstorm and his sparkling had gotten themselves into now. They’d only had little Ratchet for a lunar cycle, but already, he was finding some inventive ways of making a nuisance of himself. 

So to sum it all up, Ratchet just never took no for an answer. “No, you can’t leave the house,” and so Ratchet would crawl out the door on his hands and knees when no one was looking. “No, you can’t have rust sticks,” and so Ratchet would create an elaborate path onto the counter top to reach them. “No, you can’t watch more TV, it’s bedtime,” and so Ratchet would wait until his creators were asleep and climb out of his crib and into the living room. 

That wasn’t even beginning to touch on the fact that his hands still couldn’t come out of the gloves. Brainstorm had tried taking them off, just to see in the sensitivity had gone down, only to be met with a tearful afternoon of a whimpering, sobbing baby crying because his hands hurt. 

But despite everything, Perceptor couldn’t be more pleased with their decision to bring Ratchet home, even when he walked into the bedroom to see his son hanging from the ceiling fan going at top speed. What he could do was glare at Brainstorm, who was most likely responsible for this mess. 

“It wasn’t me, I swear! I mean, yeah, I put him  _ up _ there, but he’s the one who turned on the fan! That’s not on me!”

“Do you mean to tell me that he hot wired our fan?”

“Exactly! I don’t even know how! He hasn’t taken the gloves off!” 

Perceptor went to the switch to turn the fan off just to find that Brainstorm had been telling the truth. The switch was in the “off” position so there was absolutely no reason the fan should be causing a small dust tornado in the middle of the room - though Percy would have to do some serious cleaning. No use in leaving all the dust around to clog his little baby’s vents. 

“What in the-”

“See?” Brainstorm shouted, not realizing how unnecessarily loud he was being, “I don’t know what he did! He did something! But I don’t know what!” 

“Well, clearly. Can you give me a boost so I can try to grab him?”

“Sure thing, Percy!” 

Brainstorm threw Perceptor up so he could sit on his shoulders and moved slowly towards the fan. No good if Percy lost a finger from this. Or like, his face. 

“I’ve just got to get the timing right… Stay still, Storm!” 

Vent in, vent out. Okay, he had one shot at this. Perceptor readied his hands and steeled his nerves. He quickly calculated the speed of the fan, a background process at this point, and counting the seconds in his head. One, two, three, four, five, five point two, and SNATCH!

Percy let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding until the wave of relief swept over him so hard, he nearly fell clean off Brainstorm. There was his son, beeping angrily at having his fun cut short, but at least in one piece. 

“Oh, thank Primus he’s alright!” Brainstorm shouted up, gently grabbing his son so Perceptor could climb down from his shoulders safely. 

“How about you thank me first and _then_ thank Primus?” Percy shot Brainstorm - the put-the-child-on-the-fan-er - a sour look, then rolled his eyes. “Or maybe, you could realize you shouldn’t put babies on ceiling fans!

Brainstorm gave a nervous giggle and he twiddled his thumbs, “P-Point taken. You always have such great ideas, Percy!” 

Sometimes Brainstorm could be really dumb, even for a genius engineer. 

And sometimes Percy still gave him kisses on the cheek as if he hadn’t just said the stupidest thing since the Stone Age. 


	3. Allspark Day

“Dun wanna!”

“Ratchet, c’mon, you’re being nonsensical.”

“Nuh-uh! Don’t wanna!” 

“It’s just a little paint!”

“Bad color! Blue bad!”

“Hey! I’m blue!” 

“Then you bad too!”

Brainstorm slammed the tub of blue paint down onto the table. “Nope, not doing this. Percy, I think we have to give up. He doesn’t want the paint. Won’t listen to you, won’t listen to me, let’s just take him as is!”

“Brainstorm, it is Allspark Day,” Percy called from the bathroom where he was doing his own make up in the mirror, “Everyone has traditional face paint, it’s- it’s-!”

“Tradition?”

“Exactly!”

“Since when do sparklings care about tradition?”

“Never,” Perceptor flicked some yellow paint at Brainstorm, “But their creators do.”

“I don’t!”

“If my child is face-paintless at the parade,  _ my _ creators will send me to get reformatted into a toaster. You know how they are!”

“Old school with a stick up their afts?”

“...I’m going to ignore that and simply maintain that you and Ratchet need to be properly adorned for the occasion.”

Brainstorm turned back to a stern Ratchet with his arms crossed. His chevron was less comically big on his face than it had been when he was younger, but it was still laughably big on his face. 

“Ratchet. Come on. Work with me here. I hate this as much as you but we gotta. For Percy. Got it?”

“Still don’t wanna!” He turned his head sharply away from the offending yellow faceplates. 

“Kid? Kid,  _ please _ , I promise I’ll make it up to you.”

He pondered for a second, thinking about how such a simple statement could be twisted around. “...promise?”

“Yes, yes, I promise.”

“So, if I asked you to get me the rust sticks from Praxus, you would get them because you promised?”

Brainstorm’s optics blew wide, “Ratchet, all the way in Praxus?”

“But you promised!” 

Storm had to vent out harshly. Of course his child got Perceptor’s cunningness. Of fragging course.

“You know what, yes, I did and I will get you those rust sticks, now will you let me paint you?”

“Okay!” Ratchet happily presented his face to the blue paintbrush, as if nothing had ever been the problem. 

“Percy,” Brainstorm muttered in a low voice, “You fragging owe me.”

If he’d been paying more attention to his surroundings than his murderous internal monologue, he would have heard Perceptor chuckle from the kitchen as he talked with his parents about how they couldn’t make it to the parade today.


	4. First Day

First Aid wasn’t sure what to expect from med school but this wasn’t it. 

He’d been lucky enough to be chosen for room and board at the Protihexian Medical Preparatory Center and his first roommate, Ambulon, had introduced himself and seemed nice enough, if not a bit solitary. His hab suite was fairly close to his classes but still out of the way enough to avoid the famed Proti Prep traffic. Aid considered the fact that this building wasn’t near a main highway a big plus; he could never recharge with that much noise. 

But ever since he’d gotten his acceptance notice, he’d been waiting for the other tire to pop. Proti Prep had quite the reputation for being a notorious party school, against all odds. Allegedly, high stress and med students led to some pit-awful decision making and even the most well-meaning bots could succumb to the call of a high-grade fueled rager the night before an exam. 

First Aid had seen a few of these dropouts waiting to happen on his way in. A group of clearly intoxicated students from the higher classes had been staked out at the check in desk, assessing the crowd for any fresh paint to indoctrinate. Most bots felt at least a little offended when they were brushed off for being too square but Aid was not most bots. He was more than happy to focus on his studies and leave the partying to someone else. 

“So you’re my roommates, huh?” 

First Aid snapped out of his thoughts to see another mech drop a stack of boxes next to the last bunk and realized the mech was waiting for a response. 

“Oh, yeah, I’m First Aid and that’s Ambulon! It’s nice to meet you!”

Despite being taller than the new guy, Aid couldn’t help but feel like he was being sized up. He was painted gray and white, with red accents, not the usual medic colors, and his chevron was the stuff of legends. He appraised First Aid, looking him up and down with a critical glare, before seeming satisfied and turning back to his belongings. 

“Remind me to never let you get robbed while I’m not here.” 

Ambulon snrkked from across the room but before Aid could ask what was so funny, a knock sounded at their door. 

“Let me guess,” the new mech said, “We don’t have a fourth in this room, do we?” 

Aid just shook his head no. 

The bot dug further in the box and pulled out a hefty wrench, weighing it in his hands and tossing it up and down a bit.

“Family heirloom,” he told Aid, before turning to the door, “Watch this.” 

“Mind telling us how you got all the way up here without us seeing you come in?” First Aid tensed as he recognized the voice. The intoxicated students were here, the whole gaggle of them. Before he had the good sense to slam the door, Aid noticed Ratchet’s confident posture, brandishing the wrench. 

“That would take away the magic then,” Ratchet tutted, “I’m not fool enough to play all my cards on the first day, Pharma.” 

“You know my name? Such an honor to be known by  _ the _ Ratchet.” 

Ambulon choked on his energon from inside the room, but Aid was just confused. Who was Ratchet? 

“Listen here, you overgrown rust spot, I don’t care if you have a processor smaller than those winglets of yours, but you better know that I can and will kick your aft.” 

Aid could faintly hear Ambulon swear as his spark dropped out of its casing. 

“You think I’m scared of you?”

“No, Pharma,” Ratchet shrugged, “I know perfectly slagging well you’re scared of me. Now get out of here before I throw you out.” 

“Throw me out of where? I’m not in your room.”

“Throw you out of the fifteenth story window, you flightless hack.” 

Pharma huffed and stood taller, “You can’t talk to me like that! I’m your senior!” 

“Oh, is that so?” 

A loud clang echoed through the room, reverbing up and down the halls of the dorms. Aid’s audials were still ringing when he realized that the commotion outside had gone silent. As his systems rebooted, he saw Ratchet’s wrench, with strange white scuffs on the end that looked like pai-

“Did. Did you hit him with that?” 

“Yes,” Ratchet smirked, “I did.” 

Ambulon instantly went up to Ratchet and started raving about something or other, telling him how cool he had been and he couldn’t believe that they were actually sharing a room. 

“-so, why did you bring a wrench? I’m sure that you could’ve literally gotten, like, a disintegrating gun, right?” 

“Well, Perceptor told me I could only take something from a tool box. Brainstorm wasn’t happy about it so he made me this wrench. It can shock people and heat energon.” 

Perceptor? Brainstorm? Why would two of the greatest engineers on Cybertron have a say in what this mech did? And why did his name sound familiar? The gears clicked slowly in First Aid’s processor as he tried to put all the pieces together. 

“You know, they told me to watch out for Pharma, since he-”

“Wait! You’re  _ the _ Ratchet?” 

Ratchet laughed, pointing the wrench at the shocked mech, “Glad you finally came around, Aid.”


	5. Late Shift

The end of a long shift and an even longer day had Orion Pax questioning his life choices. Ever since he began working under Alpha Trion, things had worked out for the better. It was a stability he’d never felt before, not having to worry about the dreaded check ups at the end of a vorn or the threat of becoming obsolete. He got to ride the Senate trams, more polished than he was most of the time, and he’d be lying if he said it didn’t make him childishly giddy. The responsibility of maintaining the Iaconian Archives didn’t daunt him – he’d been made for this, after all – but being the first to arrive and last to leave had its downfalls.

Most notably, the punctuality that seemed to come and go as the Senate pleased. If he were even a klik late for opening, there would be, without fail, a senator or secretary there to chastise him for his tardiness. These same senators and secretaries would be the first to justify staying after hours and keeping him long after his shift was over nearly every night. Orion silently thanked Primus that this was not one of those nights.

“Hey, excuse me, don’t close that door!”

Oh, frag it all.

Orion braced his face with a fake smile and turned but before he got a word out, the mech was on top of him, talking a million miles an hour.

“Sorry to be a bother,” the mech shook his hand frantically, “But apparently my professor made something due today,” Orion noticed the reflective white paint, nearly blinding him even in the low light, “And the console I usually use is busted so I’m just trying to get this in, I won’t even be a klik!”

Orion felt something get shoved in his hand as the mech practically pushed him out of the way of the doors and barged towards the consoles. Briefly, Orion wondered how the strange bot had gotten in without the key, but then promptly noticed that in the commotion, the key had been stolen right from his hand and replaced with… A half empty bottle of Engex?

With nothing better to do, Orion took to reading the bottle more carefully. Ah, it wasn’t just Engex, it was straight Nightmare Fuel, the kind that even shuttles can only have a shot of. Why in Primus’s name would a random mech be running around with this?

“Thanks for waiting for me! I know I didn’t really give you a choice, but I didn’t have much of one either. Here are the keys! You can keep the Engex!”

“Hold on, hold on,” Orion put an arm in front of the mech who’d already gotten a few steps away, “Wait, I need to understand this.”

His processor finally caught up to reality as he looked the late offender up and down. Clearly a medic, sporting the traditional colors, and clearly just coming from the middle of a party, if the shiny paint and eclectic adornments were anything to go by. Quite frankly, the mech _looked_ like he’d just chugged half a bottle of Nightmare Fuel.

“Who-“

“Oh! I didn’t introduce myself! I’m Ratchet!”

So much for his processor catching up.

“Hello, I’m Orion Pax. I have a few questions.”

The medic, _Ratchet_, stared at Orion with too-bright optics that probably only hinted to sheer amount of high-grade chugging through his systems.

“Why were you turning in your report in the middle of a party?”

“An easy question, thank Primus! The bartender lets me use his console for it all the time! Otherwise, I’d have to leave sooner and that’s not good for business!”

This mech did not look at all mature enough to be spending all-nighters at a bar.

“Okay. Did you drink all this?” Orion pointed disbelievingly at the bottle in his hand.

“No, of course not!” Ratchet waved a hand, smiling, “I don’t drink that slag! It’s for bots who are still cooling out of the forge!”

“What.”

“I drink the harder stuff! I couldn’t get slagged off a case of _those_!” He pointed an accusing finger at the Nightmare Fuel as Orion tried to parse what he’d just been told.

“Di-did you drive here yourself?”

Ratchet gave him a look that asked how he dared to make such a stupid question.

Orion Pax had dealt with crazy mechs before – or so he had thought. Vorns of working with Senators who could blow up at the slightest scent of an insult had tempered his words into a naturally neutral cadence and manner, something he was eternally grateful for. But for some reason, whether it was the long day or the reflection assaulting his optics or if he’d somehow absorbed the high-grade through the bottle in his hand, Orion found himself completely and utterly incapable of any form of eloquence or class.

“How are you not dead?”

The burst of laughter that escaped Ratchet was nothing short of maniacal and Orion couldn’t help but think that it was louder than him most days.

“Primus is too scared of me to take me back!”

Orion looked at the sight in front of him, the living train wreck on his doorstep in ambulance form and let himself laugh into the cold night air.

“Well, I don’t blame him!”

Ratchet held the bottle between them, sizing Orion and his three little wheels up. “What about you? Too scared to accompany me back to the party? Not like you have anything better to do, right?”

Orion Pax was a dignified mech. He was Alpha Trion’s apprentice, Head Archivist of Iacon. He was also already friends with a gladiator from Kaon. This crazy glitch? He was nothing in comparison.

“Lead the way, new friend.”


End file.
